"I belong to the Primitive Baptist Church and have been belonging to it altogether about sixty-three years. I used to be a Missionary. I been a member of the church a long time.
"I think times are jus fulfilling the Bible. The people are wiser now than we ever known them to be and wickeder. I don't believe the times you see now will be always. People are getting so wise and so wicked that I think the end is near at hand. You notice the Germans now are trying to make slaves out of the Jews. There's the Japans that is jus slaughtering up the Chinese like they was nothin but dumb brutes. The world is wickeder than it ever has been before.
"The young people today! I'd hate to tell you what I do think of them. The business is going to fall."
Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed: Casper Rumple, De Valls Bluff, Arkansas
Age: 78
"I will be, providin' the good Lord spare me, 79 years old the first day of January. I was born in Lawrence County, South Carolina. The Big road was the dividing line between that and Edgefield County. My mother belonged to John Griffin. His wife named Rebecca. My father was a Irishman. Course he was a white man—Irishman. Show I did know him. He didn't own no slaves. I don't guess he have any land. He was a overseer in Edgefield County. His name was Ephraim Rumple. What become of him? He went off to fight the Yankees and took Malaria fever and died on Red River. I could show you bout where he died.
"My mother had a big family. I can't tell you much bout them. I was the youngest. She cooked up at John Griffins. He was a old man and the land was all his wife's. She was old too. She had some grown girls. He had no children. They called him Pa and I did too. I stayed round with him nearly all the time helping him.
"He had a room and she had a room. I slept on a bed—little bed—home-made bed—in the room wid him and she slept in the room with her two girls and my mother slept in the kitchen a whole heap so she be there to get breakfast early. They riz early every mornin'. John Griffins wife owned four plantations more than 160 acres in each one, but I couldn't say how much.
"My mother was a field hand in busy times too. Miss Rebecca had all the slaves clothes made. She seed to that. She go to the city, Augusta, and bring back bolts cloth. One slave sewed for Miss Rebecca and her family. She didn't do all the sewing but she sewed all the time. One woman done all the weavin'. At night after they work in the field Miss Rebecca give em tasks—so many bats to card or so much spinnin' to do.